"Religious Freedom" Bills Get Rightbloggers Dreaming of a Discrimination-Friendly America

There's nothing rightbloggers love better than playing the victim, and few things they hate more than civil rights legislation and homosexuals. So last month you might say they hit the trifecta.

When a few businesses complained that gays were forcing them to take wedding pictures and bake wedding cakes, several state legislatures considered laws that would bolster the right of God-fearing folks to refuse service to anyone their religion demanded, hint hint.

Rightbloggers cheered this opportunity to protect helpless hets like themselves from the homos who demand, contrary to the Founders' intent, to be treated like everyone else. And in the process they revived an argument most of you probably haven't seen since the early 1960s: The one about how having to serve a [fill in the blank] violates their civil rights.

The laws proposed in Kansas, Arizona, Tennessee, Idaho and elsewhere generally would strengthen state Religious Freedom Restoration Acts (RFRA) to further protect businesses that refused service to gay-marrying customers on religious grounds.

If you wonder why it should be okay to toss gay-marrying customers but not black ones, it's because the latter have Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects customers of public accommodations (like bakeries and flower shops) from discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, or national origin. Title II does not protect on the grounds of gayness, however, a loophole which these bills exploited.

Rightbloggers loved this loophole, and some of them hoped to widen it to include other people.

Not a lot of religious-liberty-law cartoons -- guess the MSM has got this one locked up tight! -- so here's an oldie but goodie, via.

In the current controversy, rightbloggers separated roughly into two camps: Those who sought to convince readers that just because they wanted businesses to be able to turn gays away didn't mean they were against anti-discrimination laws, at least in the abstract; and those who forthrightly said hell yes, I'm against anti-discrimination laws.

"SB1062 does not say that businesses can discriminate for religious reasons," read the letter in part. "It says that business people can assert a claim or defense under RFRA, in any kind of case (discrimination cases are not even mentioned, although they would be included), that they have the burden of proving a substantial burden on a sincere religious practice, that the government or the person suing them has the burden of proof on compelling government interest, and that the state courts in Arizona make the final decision." And then they can discriminate for religious reasons -- or sooner, if the person they threw out of their store doesn't have the time or resources to sue.

Some of the brethren tried to bat away objections to the new laws by explaining, hey gays, you already have zero protection, get over it -- because the RFRAs already let people discriminate against you; we're just making it official.

"Despite hysterical claims that SB 1062 would have 'legalized discrimination in Arizona," sniffed Brandon McGinley at The Federalist, "you may be surprised to learn that sexual orientation and gender identity are not protected classes in Arizona. Which is to say, except in Phoenix, Flagstaff, and Tucson, which include those traits in local ordinances, it's already legal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in Arizona [emphasis McGinley's]." Hurray!

Gays aren't feeling the force of that law already "because Arizona isn't full of hordes of cackling Christians plotting an LGBT apartheid state," asserted McGinley proudly. Which presumably is why Arizona needed a new law: to make such a thing easier to accomplish.

Alas for McGinley, Brewer vetoed the law, over which he was very sore, as was Fox News' Todd Starnes, who tweeted that Brewer was making "Christians in her state second class citizens" -- the gays presumably being first class citizens, to whom the Christians would now have to pay the jizya, if you know what we mean.

In fact, as the state bills failed to get traction, rightboggers got less instructional and more grumpy, which makes sense -- here they'd been defending freedom from homosexuals, and suddenly even Republicans and chambers of commerce were turning against them.

"Freedom of conscience is squashed under the jackboot of liberals, all in the Orwellian name of 'equality and fairness,'" snarled Tammy Bruce, a self-identified "gay conservative woman." "...Horribly, the gay civil rights movement has morphed into a Gay Gestapo." She must be fun at parties.

As you might imagine, religious rightbloggers, who are perhaps more likely than most to imagine themselves telling a gay couple to get out of their store, were most outraged of all when the Arizona bill fell.

Terry Mattingly of Get Religion explained that liberals were The Real Bigots™ because they wouldn't stand up for Christians' right to say we don't serve your kind here. "Now we hear from some of media's biggest elites," quavered Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, "that transcendent freedoms are to be obliterated in favor of individual liberties, and that opposition to this notion is the real enemy." Also, she said, the press "loathes and works actively to suppress" religious liberty, though it is the basis of their own liberty, for some perverse reason probably diabolical in origin. The proof: They constantly refer to the Arizona bill as "anti-gay." Like they had anything to do with it!

Some looked on the bright side, i.e. on their own martyrdom. "As my side is destined to lose here," raved Some Guy at RedState, "I feel it's a good idea to leave this as a marker so that the other side understands why their grandchildren, insofar as they have them, will be an oppressed underclass in the Republic of Texas under my incredibly numerous descendants. I would like to explain why it's so important for Christians to be able to refuse to do work to advance gay 'marriage' and everything that goes with it." And if he catches one of his Quiverfull watching Glee, out into the gay storm he goes!

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I
started a petition to demand the resignation of the justices who do
have added discrimination into the constitution. Tell the government we
won’t stand as a society to compromise one group of peoples rights for
anthers. Religious freedom does not trump women’s rights.

Everyone
please share with others, if we get 100,000 signatures the government
has to acknowledge that the justices have gone down a bad path / by
protecting one class of people they are hurting 51% of the populations
freedoms. SIGN HERE TODAY! http://wh.gov/lLte8

Being gay does not mean one has to choose only one specific kind of bedroom behavior or family format. It seems to me that people who support sexual freedom should be the last people to declare that a gay person's private choices disqualify him from picking his own identity.

I am quietly confident that the Sermon on the Mount didn't end with "Except for fags." Maybe these so-called Christians are reading a different Bible than I have. Or more likely, they read it, but didn't care.

How little those arguing from the "capitalism will fix it" really understand about capitalism. It assumes their bigoted beliefs are in the minority, first of all. And what a strange argument to make that their bigotry will obviously be crushed by "market forces," shutting down the businesses they are trying to protect.

I should not be asked to support, with my tax dollars, their religious beliefs via the infrastructure that allows those businesses to exist in the first place. if they want to get all Atlas Shrugged, I completely support them moving to their own land and privately building their own infrastructure. Then they can say that they "built that." Why should I have to leave my community to be treated with dignity and respect? Let them leave and create their own theocracy somewhere else.

What little understanding these bigots have about how capitalism works. And how weird it is that their argument depends on the majority not being bigoted like they are and that the very businesses they are protecting will eventually fail anyway.

Apparently it's really the gays that want to discriminate - against women. In fact, according to Kelly Bartlett, gay marriage is a plot to create a glass-ceiling preventing women from marrying gay men.

People who are the main reason for Civil Rights laws are against Civil Rights laws, loudly and damply, even though their ideological fellow travelers have recognized the huge goddamn hole in the collective wallet, and they wonder why they get laughed at all the damn time.

@McSalmon Yeah, thats always confused me also. I mean, i think most people who are very anti-gay based on their religion link it back to leviticus, yet disregard almost all of the other things leviticus says you cant do. So why that one in particular?

Also, nearly all of the anti-gay-based-on-religion folk identify themselves as "christians" but, and if i'm wrong about this someone should point it out to me, a christian by definition is a follower of the word and teachings of Jesus Christ yeah? Well, unless i just missed the day they talked about this in sunday school, i cannot recall a single time that Jesus ever said anything about hating gays. As a matter of fact, the primary things he said that i can recall were mostly about loving each other, treating others as you would be treated, and then there was the bit about judgement being reserved for God alone.

So, how is being a bigot even remotely christian? Seems to be pretty much the opposite of christian to me but hey, what do i know?

Well, what really irritates me is the ignorance these people have about how civil rights laws work, and the amnesia they have about why they work the way they do.

Basically, the libertarian argument against them is that it's just completely unthinkable to imagine businesses engaging in a widespread campaign of discrimination, despite such a thing having happened in living memory.

My dad remembers seeing segregated drinking fountains. There are people alive today who lived through exactly what people like Ben Domenech is now saying is impossible to imagine.

This is kind of like a German saying "I can't imagine an openly anti-semitic government would ever be successful".

@alanhw Yeah or government owned mountains.... and and.. government owned oceans and and... governement owned hospitals and and... and if you accept obamacare or uh uh social security... government owned you.... yeah... YOU I say.... "bonehead"

@alanhw @autonomousthomas Get the government out of the street business??? WTF does
that mean? Our roads must be paved (Through our tax dollars)…. Wait… your
attempt at sarcasm…What you REALLY mean
is if government is involved, regardless the venture, Government may dictate… But what about the Bill of Rights? You know…
The little piece of paper that protects our individual liberty?

Recently it was announced (Through Snowden) that Government
has been spying through our Web Cams, listening in through our smart phones, etcetera
and etcetera and etcetera... You AGREE with that!!! I mean after all government is in the business
of regulating communications… Are you a bootlicker or do wish you worked for
the NSA? … Which one? You like the heel on the back of the neck or applying it?